


Wishes and Horses

by sistabro



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Gen, Nightmares, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-08
Updated: 2010-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-09 16:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistabro/pseuds/sistabro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/roque_clasique/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/roque_clasique/"><strong>roque_clasique</strong></a> 's birthday prompts: S1, Dean and Sam have just started hunting together again, and as fucked-up as Sam is over Jess's death, he still notices some things... namely, his brother is drinking a hell of a lot more than he remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wishes and Horses

**Author's Note:**

> So a prompt for roque_clasique 's birthday. Happy birthday!

It takes longer than it should for Sam to notice.

Sure, he has some good excuses. It has only been a few weeks since Dean came to pick him up from Stanford, since Jess. And Sam feels like he’s being pulled apart, draft horses tied to each limb; it’s everything he can do to maintain any sort of center. He wants too many impossible things. He wants Jess, wants her back, wants his life back, wants Dean to have stayed away even if it would have meant spending the rest of his life feeling like he was missing his shadow, wants Dean never to leave, never to have left so he can hide behind his big brother forever, wants his goddamn bastard of a father, wants answers, wants revenge, wants Stanford never to have happened, that his father had succeeded in stomping out any capacity for dreaming and hope because then Jess would still be alive, a stranger but alive, and there wouldn’t be this terrible awkwardness between him and Dean because it never would have entered his mind to go. He also wants to sleep for twelve hours straight because it would probably make things feel a little more manageable, but that too seems to be an impossible dream. And then of course there are the dreams themselves, but he just… just can’t deal with that right now.

So yeah, lots of excuses, but still, it takes longer than it should for him to notice.

He’s pretty sure Dean is trying to hide it. Sam takes this to be both a good and a bad sign. Good, because it means at some level Dean knows that this is wrong and he is ashamed enough to try to hide it from Sam. Bad because Sam is kind of fucked up right now--he’s getting maybe ten hours of sleep a week and insomnia has more or less placed a permanent fog bank over the world--and Dean still couldn’t manage to hide it completely. Which means it is probably worse than what Sam has managed to pick up on, which, yeah, is pretty fucking bad.

Because what Sam has noticed is this: Dean is suddenly very fond of mouthwash and really strong cologne that makes Sam want to sneeze any time he gets too close; Dean’s duffle clanks when you toss it around and Sam can’t remember it ever doing that before; Dean more or less passes out when he sleeps now and not even Sam stumbling around at all hours, including breaking a glass in the sink with the bathroom door open, wakes his brother up; Dean's responses just seem…off, like a movie where the sound and the video are just slightly out of sync. But the real clincher is the flask and the furtive sip he caught Dean taking from it by the magazine racks when Sam stepped out of the bathroom at a gas station this morning. Because Sam gave his brother that flask for his eighteenth birthday and when he left, it had been filled with holy water, which will do in a dehydration pinch, but it’s generally kind of stale and stealing it from churches is a pain. So yeah, the flask put all pieces together for him and now Sam has no idea what to do.

Because he’s pretty sure his big brother has a drinking problem and at the moment Sam is feeling like maybe it might not be such a bad idea to get on the bandwagon. He probably won’t dream if he drinks himself into oblivion, which is a pretty tempting idea all around.

Sam bangs his head against the passenger window to try to get his brain to behave.

"You okay, Sam?" Dean asks quietly from the driver’s seat.

"I’m fine."

"Sure? Need to stop?"

Sam can feel Dean’s eyes on him and some part of him starts wringing its hands over alcohol and delayed reaction times and crashes and he can’t reign in his mouth in time, more bite then he wanted seeping into his voice. "Dude, eyes on the road, I’m fine."

"Sure you're fine," Dean mutters before dropping it.

Sam closes his eyes against the pulses of green outside and bangs his head against the window again. Because no, he isn’t fine, not at all, and he’s pretty sure Dean’s drinking, like everything else, is probably his fault. But unlike everything else, maybe this is something he can fix, if only he could clear his head and just _think_.

Christ, he needs sleep to deal with this shit.

***

Unfortunately, sleep is not on the menu for Sam. So later in the motel room he waits for Dean to pass out and does research instead.

AA and Google Health and Wikipedia and AL-Anon and site after site of symptoms and causes and rehab flick eldritch light into his eyes until he has to lay his head into the cradle of his arms on the table and breathe. Just for a moment, just so he can process.

Instead, he falls asleep.

***

For once Sam’s not dreaming of Jess, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t having a nightmare. Instead of flames everything moves in sickening swirls of whiskey gold and jaundice yellow and something landing on his shoulder in the waking world morphs into a screeching drunken monkey in a stupid Shriner hat clawing at his back. He wakes up flailing.

His hand bangs hard into the laptop, sends it teetering off the table. He hears Dean swear next to him and like magic the falling laptop is gone, safely ensconced in his brother’s hands while Sam tries to make his eyes focus and his heart rate slow.

Dean makes a soft chuffing sound, one that Sam instantly recognizes because he loathes it, heard it every time Dad reamed Dean out for being less than perfect. It’s the sound of Dean’s shame and Sam is instantly furious, ready to—

And then his brain catches up, makes the connection between Dean with the laptop in his hands looking at the screen and what Sam had been researching last night.

Dean looks at Sam then, eyes meeting and sliding away, and awkward does not even begin to cover it.

Dean gently sets the laptop down on the table and closes the screen.

And then Dean starts to shuffle away, clearing his throat, and something inside Sam just snaps.

He doesn’t even realize he’s reached out to grab Dean’s wrist until his brother tugs gently at it with a soft, "Sam?"

Sam’s mind is reeling, because he knows if he doesn’t handle this right, then he could lose Dean and he just can’t. Just can’t. And while he’s desperately trying to come up with the perfect thing to say that will fix everything, fix Dean, he feels another tug on his arm. In a flash of stupid panic that Dean is leaving him right now, he blurts out, “So, uh, do you think you could lay off on the cologne? Because I think I’m allergic to that shit.”

"Sam?"

Sam finally looks at Dean again, at the wary, terrified expression he put on his brother’s face and takes pity on him.

"I need coffee. Go get some breakfast."

As soon as he manages to pry his fingers open, Dean is out the door, and Sam takes a few deep breaths to calm the fluttering fear in his chest that that will be the last time he sees his brother. He gives the bed a wistful glance, wishing he could just curl up under the covers and dream it all away. But he can’t. Can’t sleep, can't dream anything that doesn’t make him want to claw his heart out, and he can’t unknow what he knows, or that Dean knows that he knows.

So he allows himself one more deep breath before heading to the bathroom. He’s got to piss and he wants a shower. When Dean gets back they will talk. Sam will make him talk. Because there are lots of things that are Sam’s fault, but this, this one maybe he can fix and he’ll never forgive himself if he doesn’t try.

So he will.


End file.
